
84 PEOPLES OF THE PHILIPPINES 
farm on irrigated terraces. Moreover, the system of 
terraced irrigation is extensively followed in both Japan 
and China; and if less widely practised in Indo-China, 
it is because the natural swamp lands are of greater 
extent in that peninsula and the population of many 
tracts less concentrated. On a broader view, therefore, 
the terraces of the Luzon mountaineers are by no 
means a unique phenomenon in the part of the world in 
question. They impress by their stupendousness and 
daring and by the contrast which they display with the 
general backward status of their makers; but their 
peculiar quality is one of intensity and not of kind. 
Now the almost unanimous verdict of both history 
and ethnology is that when a certain art is shared by a 
number of peoples, and evidence as to its origin is ob- 
tainable, it almost always becomes clear that this origin 
occurred among the more advanced rather than the less 
advanced peoples of the group; or where both are now 
equally advanced in general civilization, then among that 
nation whose civilization isthe oldest. Onthe basis of 
this well-established principle, it becomes practically 
certain that the Igorot or Ifugao was not the inventor of 
his system of irrigation. He undoubtedly extended it to 
conditions under which its pursuit has rarely been 
attempted by any other people; but the knowledge, 
the basic idea of the art, and the essentials of its tech- 
nique, must have developed elsewhere. Where this 
center of origination lay, is another question which can- 
not be entered into here because it is a general Malaysian 
or East Asiatic problem and not a Filipino one: but 
the source is likely to have been on the mainland of 
southeastern Asia; or if in the East Indies, then in that 
portion of them nearest Asia. 
It is more difficult to form a judgment as to who may 
have been the carriers of this invention to the interior 

